Government Screw-ups

[wonderingmind42]

This came from 776281 on another thread: (http://www.manpollo.org/forums/showthread.php?p=2554&posted=1#post2554)

I too feel that governments often stuff up legislation often creating more problems than they solve. One simple example: The Midland Shire Council in Western Australia did not like how many clocks showed different times and introduced an ordinance with fifty dollar fines if a clock in a public area was more than 5 minutes out. Surprise surprise shop keepers and building owners did not correct the time, they removed the clocks.

In the book I'm going to be calling for strong government action, which is a great way to alienate a large segment of my target population. To mitigate that, I'm going to briefly cover the strengths and weaknesses of both government and the Free Market as institutions, calling on using both to address the problem.

So, to build some empathy with Joe Public reader who has conservative leanings (or really, anybody who doesn't enjoy April 15--that's tax day in the U.S. for you furners), it would be great to have a bunch of examples to pick from of classic government screw-ups.

Thanks!

[mamainaction]

This came from 776281 on another thread: (http://www.manpollo.org/forums/showthread.php?p=2554&posted=1#post2554)

So, to build some empathy with Joe Public reader who has conservative leanings (or really, anybody who doesn't enjoy April 15--that's tax day in the U.S. for you furners), it would be great to have a bunch of examples to pick from of classic government screw-ups.

Thanks!

Farm subsidies to dead people: Google that & you get lots of links. I chose this one http://anaverageamericanpatriot.blogspot.com/2007/07/farm-subsidies-corporate-welfare-dead.html because it appears to be a blog by your "average Joe". Maybe the term "Average American Patriot" would be good for the book, if the blogger would share it!

cheers!

[776281]

AUSTRALIA
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24053752-29277,00.html
SOUTH Australians overcharged for water by a "monumental" State Government "stuff up'' will get refunds, Treasurer Kevin Foley says.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/05/28/1022569769437.html A bloke called Tony Kevin has opened another Pandora's Box at the inquiry into `a certain maritime incident'. Now we've got two - SIEV4, where no kids were thrown overboard, and the mystery SIEV-X, where 150 children drowned. `X' is for `unknown'.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/13/1087065031386.html A $10 million State Government bungle that led to wrong payments to hundreds of aged and disability services is to be corrected a year after it was detected.

But none of the groups overpaid last year - some by tens of thousands of dollars - will be asked to pay back money and none of those underpaid will be recompensed for the shortfall.

USA
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24996 During the Watergate investigation into Nixon administration corruption, a familiar question to witnesses was: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

A good variation on that question more than a month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack is: "What did the government know and when did it know it?"

http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?pub_id=595 Hard on the heels of a US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) commitment to consult openly and widely on the development of a regulatory approach to nanotechnology, the government has given the green light to introduce more than 15 novel, nano-formulated chemicals.

http://confuseddriving.ytmnd.com/ Good for a laugh

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/11/government-failure-evidence-of.html
http://www.topix.com/forum/us/T897BH82HMC2NS39K

United Kingdom
http://vented-spleen.blogspot.com/2007/11/and-todays-government-****-up-is.html Hundreds of criminals, including those accused of sexual offences, have avoided prosecution after a "cover-up" in magistrates' courts

Kosovo
http://www.kosovo.net/news/archive/ticker/2004/December_09/10.html Sadula Duraku, the future Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Economy, is one of the three commanders who cut off the drinking water supply to Kumanovo in 2001.


Google Government plus stuff up, bungle, screw up, failure, boo boo, **** up, snafu, fubar, blunder, clanger' absurdity, antics, lunacy folly and any other word for mistake or stupidity and you get so many possibilities. Are you more interested in the funny or serious ones. Even the total no of results individually is huge. Swallowed a thesaurus and got hits on all I tried.

Did you want legislative or administrative failure?

[776281]

There is also a significant body of work on unintended consequences of legislation.

eg http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/dissertations/AAI3235928/ This research finds that term limits have not produced the consequences that proponents had envisioned.
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0379073898001625 The unintended consequences of environmental justice .

[Nick Palmer]

Of course, Government legislative action has also had very good effects which almost certainly outweigh, on balance, the deadening effects.

There is a type of free marketeer who believes that things would be much better for them (they promote this selfish view to the world by claiming that things would be better for everybody) if there wasn't so much red tape hampering their ability to make as much money as they can. Make no mistake, if we did not have laws to control the worst excesses of those motivated solely by profit, the world would be a hideous place. Food would not be safe to eat, buildings would not be safe in earthquakes, electrical goods would electrocute people, criminal scams would be everywhere.

Here is a history of the discovery of, and attempts to prevent, the widespread adulteration of food with poisonous substances in Victorian England - close to the birth of consumer protection legislation. If we did not have Government looking after us, the even freer market would be like a Mafia operation on steroids...

http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2005Mar/Thefightagainstfoodadulteration.asp

[776281]

Nick don't forget the contaminated pet food, it is recent and in peoples minds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vtq2-Cy0uY

"Life without state is nasty, short and brutish." Thomas Hobbes

That said governments of all nations, regions and locally do stuff it up on a regular basis

[mamainaction]

Plowing of the Prairie & Creating the Dust Bowl:

Book Review: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
Written by Tim Gebhart
Published December 30, 2006
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/12/30/180412.php

"The area was not called the Great American Desert without reason. Rainfall tended to be cyclic and drought was not uncommon. The 1930s, though, brought a lengthy drought unlike any these people had experienced before. But it wasn't drought that left the land bereft. The weather conditions were simply a crowning blow to human activity.

The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done. They had removed the native prairie grass, a web of perennial species evolved over twenty thousand years or more, so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land - thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.
A 1931 study by an Oklahoma college showed that of the 16 million acres under cultivation in the state, 13 million were seriously eroded. As Egan explains:
And this was before the drought had calcified most of the ground. The erosion was due to a pair of perennial weather conditions on the plains: wind and brief, powerful rain or hailstorms. But it was a third element — something new to the prairie ecosystem — that was really to blame, the college agriculture experts reported: neglect. Farmers had taken their machines to the fields and produced the biggest what crops in history, transforming the great grasslands into a vast medium for turning out a global commodity. And then they ditched it.
Put simply, the drought merely provided further insult to seriously eroded soil. The prairie grasses were nature's refinement for the plains, literally holding the land in place while able to survive high winds and low rainfall. Without those prairie grasses, dust storms replaced thunderstorms and blizzards. Millions and millions of acres literally took to the sky. On at least two occasions, storms that started in the plains darkened skies on the east coast, including New York City and Washington, with dust to the point street lights came on."

I've read the book & loved the part about the Federal civil servant who came up with a remediation plan and was waiting to brief Congress. He managed to cause a delay so that the second dust storm to reach the east coast was there by the time he made his big push for his proposals.

...also from the review:

"As government is wont to do, it created a study committee. The report of the federal Great Plains Drought Area Committee was issued in August 1938. Climate change, it said, was not the reason for the dust storms and condition of the land. Instead, it laid the blame squarely with man. The committee concluded: "The Federal homestead policy, which kept land allotments low and required that a portion of each should be plowed, is now seen to have caused immeasurable harm. The Homestead Act of 1862, limiting an individual holding to 160 acres, was on the western plains almost an obligatory act of poverty." As Egan notes, to call the Homestead Act "almost an obligatory act of poverty" is "the most damning indictment."

Another part that's not captured in this review is what they refered to as the suitcase farmers. They came in, broke sod & left, intending to come back at harvest time.

The book is a torturous, depressing read, but I highly recommend it.

[conservative]

Free markets are great but even the most hardened conservative admits that just sometimes they need a push in the right direction when it comes to the greater good, charitable contributions are vastly more appealing given the deduction status they hold

emphasize soft legislation such a tax breaks for doing the right thing rather than levies for doing the wrong thing. this seems far more appealing, firstly because it has tax and break in the same sentence and secondly because it is positive and encouraging to do the right thing rather than discouraging from something they might see as perfectly fine.

for example a huge tax break on solar and wind power generation might be more well recieved than a huge levy on coal power generation, the first is positive even the cons know that producing renewable energy is good, and hell with the tax break its even better. the second insinuates that coal is destroying the planet, whether or not that is true is academic they probably think it isnt and therefore think you taxing their way of life. stay positive.